An intelligent traffic management expert system with rfid technology

Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 3024–3035

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Expert Systems with Applications
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

An intelligent traffic management expert system with RFID technology
W. Wen
Department of Information Management, LungHwa University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t ra c t
This paper presents an intelligent traffic management expert system with RFID technology. The system provides both practically important traffic data collection and control information and can trace criminal or illegal vehicles such as stolen cars or vehicles that evade tickets, tolls or vehicle taxes. The system architecture consists of an RFID reader, a passive tag, a personal computer, apair of infrared sensors, and a high-speed server with a database system. Based on RFID technology, the system collects and calculates average speed and average flow information on each road of a district area in a city. It then transmits the messages from all the congested roads in a district area to the server in the district center via a communication program. Through a flooding algorithm, eachserver in a district center exchanges and updates information with all neighbor servers in other district centers so all that the servers in various district centers can get all the latest congestion messages in a city. Therefore, a dynamic navigation system can find the shortest path that avoids congested roads. Meanwhile, we compare three types of tags for choosing a better solution for e-plates inthe future. We also adopt infrared sensors for detecting cars that do not have a tag. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Radio frequency identification Passive tags Intelligent traffic management Shortest path

1. Introduction Traffic management poses many critical challenges in most modern cities, including congestion, traffic violations, car theft, and illegal vehicles. Duringthe past few years, researchers have used GPS, radar sensors, or digital cameras to measure average car speed and maximum flow on a road in order to determine whether a driver is over the speed limit or to provide traffic information to remind drivers to avoid congestion. However, these systems do not systematically collect information to be used in a dynamic traffic guidance system to solve trafficcongestion. Additionally, these approaches cannot identify a car’s basic data, and therefore cannot solve the aforementioned problems. In 2003, Wal-Mart first instructed one of its suppliers to start using radio frequency identification (RFID) for managing its supplies (RFID Journal, 2003). Next, the US Department of Defense (DoD) announced a similar RFID mandate for its suppliers in 2004 (Wyld,2006). With the backing of retail and military giants, RFID is a growing market that is becoming widely important. The widespread use of RFID can automatically track pallets, cases, individual products, and reusable assets such as bins and containers throughout the supply chain. Chao, Yang, and Jen (2007) reviewed the history of RFID in supply chain management, the supermarket

E-mail address:wenwu@mail.lhu.edu.tw 0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.09.030

checkout process, and private issues. They wrote that RFID global sales are expected to reach US$70 billion by 2008. Tajima (2007) developed a theory of how RFID can be used in supply chain management to sustain a competitive advantage. Under the theory, he developed fourpropositions. Through them we can see that RFID technology has strategic competitive value. He mentioned 15 benefits that have been realized and divided them into two parts, throughout the supply chain (specifically, reduced shrinkage, reduced material handling, increased data accuracy, faster exception management, and improved information sharing) and major supply chain participants (specifically,...